Fourty Years of Seeing Pixels at the Movies

By David A. Price

May 16, 2013The New Yorker

Nearly every studio film at the multiplexes this summer will have been created, at least partly, by a computer. The digital origins of some effects will be easy enough to guess: starships and rocket-suited men in flight, giant fighting robots, ancient naval battles. Vastly more of them will be subtle enough to pass by the average moviegoer—casual, dialogue-driven scenes shot in front of green screens and placed into digital streetscapes, or wires and buildings digitally removed.